Michael Coe: A question for every answer.
Source: Americas Magazine published by the Organization of American
States (4/96).
This irreverent dean of Mesoamerican studies challenges canons to reveal
what lies behind the written word
Archaeologist Michael Coe is that rare scholar who avoids getting too fixed
or entrenched in his opinions. His ideas constantly evolve in fresh ways
because he remains receptive to a broad range of interpretations. Coe
possesses the impeccable credentials of a veteran dirt archaeologist by
dint of his historic excavations in the mid-1960s at the Olmec site of San
Lorenzo Tenochtitlan in the Mexican state of Veracruz. He has also earned
his spurs riding the academic range for thirty- five years as a professor
of anthropology at Yale University and curator at the Peabody Museum in New
Haven, Connecticut. As author of more than a dozen books on Mesoamerican
archaeology, anthropology, and epigraphy, Coe has documented the
revolutionary discoveries of his time and whetted the appetites of
specialists and amateurs alike with definitive, highly readable texts like
The Jaguar's Children (1965), The Maya (1966), and America's First
Civilization: Discovering the Olmec (1968). But, despite all these
impressive accomplishments, Coe never emerges as the myopic turf defender,
frozen in his thinking, arrogant out of some belief that he's got it all
right. Quite to the contrary, he embraces the paradox that says the more
you know, the less you know. Challenging himself and colleagues alike to
test weary assumptions, he hopes everyone will reconsider evidence as a
beginner does--without preconditions.
As a boy growing up on the north coast of Long Island, New York, Coe took
almost daily note of a phrase inscribed over the portal of the local high
school. "The teachers must have resented it continuously. Most teachers
would," Coe recalls. "But anyway, it said, 'Who dares to teach must never
cease to learn.' I don't know where that comes from, but I've tried to
remember that all my life. It's absolutely true!" Coe later made another
pact with himself as a student at St. Paul's School, the stern prep school
in Concord, New Hampshire. " There the teachers were your masters, and you
called them sir! Thereafter, I promised myself I would always question
authority. I wanted to be a writer, but Harvard, my next stop, wasn't
strong on creative writing. Their brand of Johnsonian criticism wasn't for
me, and I never managed grades much above a C. Then, by chance, I went to
Yucatan one Christmas in the late 1940s, and that was it! I said to hell
with literature. Back at Harvard, at the Peabody Museum, the chairman of
the Department of Anthropology informed me that nothing but straight A's
would get me into graduate school, and without a doctoral degree I'd be
finished. So I never worked harder in my life."
It was during graduate school in the late 1950s, especially after taking a
seminar with Dr. Gordon R. Willey, that Coe became interested in the
Pre-Classic (or Formative) cultures, especially the Olmec civilization
(1800-200 B.C.). He fell under the powerful spell of Miguel Covarrubias,
Alfonso Caso, and Matthew W. Stirling, all dedicated olmequistas convinced
that the mysterious culture famous for its large stone heads and so-called
were-jaguar iconography indeed predated the more famous Maya. "In those
days," Coe explains, "the Carnegie Institution was right next to Harvard so
I used to see these people, including Sir Eric Thompson, who was the
dominant man in the field. Quickly I felt his ideas--that the Olmecs were
late--were wrong. So I started researching that, and [in 1957] I wrote a
paper. I got it published. It was an attack on Thompson. I had the nerve to
do that. As it turned out, I was right and he was wrong." This pivotal
event aside, Coe went on to write his doctoral dissertation on a pre-Olmec
people who once lived on the Pacific coast of Guatemala, the Ocos (ca.
1800-1500 B. C.), based on excavations he conducted in 1957 and 1958 at a
site called La Victoria. "They didn't have writing, but they produced some
of the most complicated and beautiful pottery I've ever seen. These were
big, big village cultures in which complex social organization first began
in Mesoamerica. In fact, recently John Clark at Brigham Young University
has done marvelous additional work on this. Ocos is a hot field right now."
Coe finished his doctoral dissertation in 1959 while teaching to some eight
hundred students in a beginning anthropology course at the University of
Tennessee. "Mainly I had all the football, baseball, and basketball players
because the class was the biggest 'gut' at the school, at least it was
until I was through with it." The next year Coe moved on to Yale, where he
spent the remainder of his academic career. " I've always enjoyed teaching.
I've had some wonderful graduate students, but I've really loved the
undergraduate courses, especially one on the Indians of North America,
another on the Aztecs, which I think was taken by every Chicano student who
ever attended Yale! I could never imagine just being a curator. Willey
warned me: 'It's like being in the bone yard. Curators don't have contact
with the outside world, with real people.' I agree. They have only their
colleagues to growl at. They come to nurture grudges and get paranoid. In
teaching, everyday you're interacting with people and new ideas. I used to
shamelessly pick my students' brains. Why not? They picked mine! I let
everyone speak up. Amazing ideas emerged because these young people were
perceptive. They saw things no one else saw and asked questions no one else
was asking."
In the mid-1960s an associate, Kent Flannery, then a graduate student at
the University of Chicago, encouraged Coe to "shoot for the moon and solve
the problem of Olmec origins once and for all." He even sent Coe an
ambitious plan to excavate the entire Olmec heartland from Mixtequilla to
La Venta. Coe guessed this would take a quarter century or more to
complete. More prudently he decided to focus on one great complex of sites
discovered by Matthew Stirling in 1945 called San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan,
which was well inland along a river system through what seemed to be rich
agricultural land. Fortuitously, in 1964 Coe attended the inauguration of
Mexico's Museo Nacional de Antropologia. There Mexican colleagues Alfonso
Caso and Ignacio Bernal, as well as the pioneer, Stirling, also urged Coe
to pursue his San Lorenzo project. A year later, under Yale University
auspices, Coe received a concession to dig from Mexico's Instituto Nacional
de Antropologia e Historia (INAH). To fund the project, he lined up backing
from the National Science Foundation in the United States.
In early 1966, Coe and his assistant director, Richard Diehl, set out for
southern Veracruz. They made their way up the Coatzacoalcos River, the
Chiquito River, and other tributaries, setting up camp in this low-lying,
steamy American Mesopotamia. Coe and his team completed extensive
excavations during the dry season three years running (1966- 68) and
discovered major architectural, sculptural, and ceramic remains that added
enormously to a then very tentative sense of who the Olmec people really
were. By means of radiocarbon dating and stratigraphic analysis, Coe
established a long archaeological sequence of human occupation, which
confirmed irrefutably the great antiquity of this first true civilization
in the Americas. When the funds for the so- called Yale Project were
exhausted (not to mention Coe himself, who weathered a serious bout with
malaria), the excavation came to a close. Controversy ensued, though, as
some tradition-bound Mayanists dug in their heels and still refused to let
the Olmec civilization take its rightful place as the great mother culture.
While interviewing Coe at his summer home in the Berkshires, an idyllic
place called Skyline Farm, where he hides out to write his books, I asked
about the persistent notions that the Olmecs might have originated on the
Pacific coast of Mexico, in such places as the state of Guerrero. "Well,
Carlo Gay, [a retired businessman of Italian origin] has proposed that
idea, but I feel that region has always been too dry to support the rise of
a major civilization, a cultural horizon. Most people in the field today
see Veracruz and Tabasco as the 'fertile crescent. ' It was always well
watered. The sites are so deep! At San Lorenzo we got down to seven meters
[about twenty-one feet] before we ran out of cultural material. To move
around and excavate at a level associated with occupation as early as 2000
B.C.--even before the Olmec civilization crystalized--it's very difficult.
But there are still very little data."
And what of current archaeological excavations at San Lorenzo today? "Well,
[as reported in the November 1993 issue of National Geographic], in the
late 1980s there were excavations at what may have been a pilgrimage site,
a bunch of springs called El Manati. They [Mexican archaeologists Ponciano
Ortiz and Carmen Rodriguez] found these remarkable wooden objects, Olmec
figures that survived because they were waterlogged, as in an Irish or
Danish bog. The wood didn't disintegrate because the bacteria couldn't get
to it. These pieces show that most of the sculptures at San Lorenzo
probably were wooden, but now they're completely gone. Also the textiles,
completely gone. If we had them," Coe observes ruefully, "my God, it would
be an entirely different thing!"
"If you had the luxury of turning back the clock and starting anew based on
what you now know, what would you focus on," I asked Coe. Without
hesitation, he said he would home in on Mesoamerican epigraphy, studying
the recorded history of these ancient peoples, which now, for the most
part, can be read. "I've always been fascinated by writing systems, all
kinds: Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Chinese. Actually, my first published paper
was on writing systems, trying to show that there are pre-Maya dates and
writing with Olmec roots." In 1973, Coe published a splendid book, The Maya
Scribe (Grolier Press), which made available to both academicians and
laypersons much of what was then known about Maya writing. Nearly twenty
years later, again focusing on epigraphy, Coe penned a nonfiction
bestseller, his spine-tingling Breaking the Maya Code, which reads like a
detective novel. Because he had followed the drama from the inside and knew
personally most of the key players, Coe was the only person who could have
written the book. "Colin Ridler, my editor at Thames and Hudson in London,
he's the one who urged me to do it. All along I had reacted against Eric
Thompson because I thought he was on the wrong track [denying that Maya
inscriptions represented a true written language]. Singlehandedly he was
holding the field back. I was also offended by Ignace Gelb' s book, A Study
of Writing (Chicago, 1952), which was very bad--racist. Essentially it said
only white men could invent writing systems. He treated the Maya very
badly. On the other hand, I reacted positively to the linguists in the
fields and especially this Russian, Yuri Knorovsov, whom I thought was on
the right track. He'd been treated very unfairly. My wife being Russian and
bilingual, we got to know him in Leningrad and eventually became his
champion."
In the highly spirited prose of a born storyteller, Coe recounts in
Breaking the Maya Code how the carved and painted inscriptions were
deciphered by a mixed bag of courageous scholars, some with academic
credentials, some as autodidactic aficionados, but all working in
isolation, without the slightest bit of encouragement from a haughty
establishment. "I think my native rebelliousness might have helped me see
the potential of their efforts," Coe laughs, "because in the Maya field
there is so much conservatism . . . there still is today. Nine out of ten
of these people were stuck in the past, slavishly following a person like
Thompson. Even today many refuse to learn to read the glyphs even though
most have been deciphered! Of course, Thompson's passing [in 1975] made it
somewhat easier for everyone working on the problem. Various people came
out of the closet--people like David Kelley, who had championed Knorovsov's
work as early as the 1950s and 1960s."
The Palenque Mesas Redondas, or Palenque Roundtables, which began in 1973,
thanks to the organizational efforts of artist-photographer Merle Greene
Robertson, represented another critical juncture. These informal
get-togethers, involving mavericks like Coe, Elizabeth Benson, Gillett
Griffin, Linda Schele, Floyd Lounsbury, and David Stuart (to mention only
some of the best known archaeologists in attendance), allowed for the
pooling of ideas and data to mount a final assault on the nonbelievers.
"Yes, those were among the all-time great conferences because things
clicked and fell into place. After that, sure, there were some grouches
with their noses out of joint just as there were with [Jean-Francois]
Champollion after he deciphered the Rosetta Stone. But after Palenque it
became intellectually untenable to deny the Maya had a true written
history."
On his paternal grandmother's side Coe descends from New England whaling
stock based near New Bedford, Massachusetts. Perhaps it is from this
heritage the archaeologist derives not only his strong, independent spirit
but also a certain wanderlust. In recent years Coe and his family often
have traveled to Europe (especially Italy, a favorite place), and he had
just returned from several weeks in Australia and Bali.
Coe wants to organize a conference of Mayanists to meet in Bali. " It would
be a marvelous chance to bring them into contact with what is known about
Bali and show the Maya parallels in terms of ritual and mental systems via
the deciphered inscriptions. We're just getting into this with the Maya,
but in Bali it's still alive! There are so many resemblances. Some may be
strictly evolutionary convergence, but others well may be real
connections." Then Coe pauses and laughs, realizing full well he's
embarking on touchy stuff: unfashionable theories about transpacific
contacts between Mesoamerica and Asia that stubbornly refuse to go away.
"There are so many resemblances between mental systems of Bali and
Mesoamerica. It got to the point I could predict what they [the Balinese]
were going to do next from my knowledge of the Maya. Truly amazing! To see
temple rituals, to see how temples were put together, the connection
between astronomy and calendar. They have one very similar to that of
Mesoamerica--a permutation calendar--and it relates to the everyday way of
life in which all Balinese participate fully. You can develop models from
the Maya area on this."
That these views echo the fascinating but still controversial theories of
Mexico's great Renaissance man (painter, caricaturist, ethnologist,
archaeologist, and anthropologist) Miguel Covarrubias is no accident. "I've
had a lifelong interest in Covarrubias," Coe admits. "He's my hero! I
worship Covarrubias. His book Island of Bali (1937) is still the best book
on the subject. It has its biases, but he had incredible instincts, those
of an artist, an artist's eye. Being a caricaturist, from everything he
could select the essence. I never met him personally. He died relatively
young. He was a devoted socialist, a Marxist. Instead of going to a private
clinic for something minor, he went to the state clinic because he believed
in the Revolution. Basically they killed him there."
Clearly Coe believes Covarrubias's heretical transpacific diffusionist
theories may hold some truth. "We don't have any explanation, and we have
to work out the time problem. The resemblances between Southeast Asia and
Mesoamerica are extraordinary, but you can't take it from Angkor to
Mesoamerica because the latter ruins are so much older than those in
Cambodia. The visual aspects could be just stylistic, something that comes
from looking at something in a similar way. Hence that' s not reliable. But
I'm looking at mental systems, costoological systems, which are almost
identical on both sides of the Pacific. Calendars, eclipse cycles, those
things are probably not fortuitous. You can' t invoke psychic unity on
things like that." And then, there is the jade. "Yes, in both places an
obsessive interest and the coating of jade with red and placing a jade bead
in the mouth as a symbol of life. These are uncanny things, something you
can get your hands on. Most anthropologists are so fuddy-duddy. They're not
willing to let their minds roam ahead, speculate. These things need
explanations! Maybe it went the other way [westward] or, if there were
connections, perhaps it was a two-way street, or peoples coming across the
Bering Strait were much more complex than we think. People downplay these
hunting-gathering cultures. We know from the Australian aborigines that the
amount of mental baggage in these people is extraordinary. They may have an
extremely simple material culture with few material possessions, but they
have a rich, rich mythological, mental culture that helps them control
their environment to survive. Archaeologists just come up with chipped
stone tools and automatically think these people were savages!"
Despite his extensive travels (at the time of this interview he was about
to leave for Cuba, where a daughter was getting married), with unceasing
energy and great discipline, Coe still finds time to pound out his
typewritten manuscripts on topics wide and narrow. Usually he works in a
sparsely furnished cubbyhole of an office within his farmhouse. Sometimes
he likes to remove himself completely from the fray, as in the case of
Breaking the Maya Code, which mostly was written in Rome. "They couldn't
get me on the phone. And I wasn't interrupted by constantly consulting all
the books. I just let it flow and checked the details later." Coe's next
opus, due out in 1996, is a book entitled The True History of Chocolate. It
grew out of years of research by his wife, Sophie Dobzhansky Coe, an
anthropologist, who also earned a doctorate at Harvard and became a
specialist on the culinary history of Latin America. Coe's devoted partner
of nearly forty years unexpectedly succumbed to cancer in 1995, just after
the appearance of her first book, America's First Cuisines, a detailed
survey of Maya, Aztec, and Inca foodstuffs. At the time of her death, she
had accumulated thousands of pages of notes on chocolate but had completed
only two chapters of the final manuscript. "I sort of promised her to
complete the work," says Coe. "Of course cacao, the real word for
chocolate, is universal throughout Mesoamerica. It shows up in the Maya
inscriptions. The word is of Mixe-Zoque origin, what now looks like the
language of the Olmecs. They were the ones who figured out how to process
chocolate from the pod. It's not obvious-fermentation, roasting,
processing. But it's consistent with a complex culture. There are many
other Mixe-Zoque loanwords in other Mesoamerican cultures, generally
associated with high cultural things, complex ideas like the word for
incense- -pore. The Olmecs were highly cultured."
In the planning stages is a book entitled "Art of Maya Writing." " It's
going to be almost a coffee-table book with magnificent pictures taken by
the New York photographer Justin Kerr. It's going to go into the
calligraphy, how these things were produced, and especially the role of the
scribes, who were the calligraphers. It will show convergence between the
Mayan approach and that of the Chinese. The word for painting and writing
are basically the same in Maya and so too in Chinese. Dzib in Maya. We know
they used brush pens. We have drawings of them using them." Kerr and his
wife, Barbara, have devoted much of their careers to documenting
pre-Columbian art and in the process have become highly knowledgeable
amateurs, much respected by Coe and others in the field. In the 1970s Kerr
developed a revolutionary roll-out camera so that paintings and
inscriptions on Maya vessels could be photographed as one unbroken
sequence. The new book will present extensively this sort of imaging.
How had Coe managed to keep an open mind, a willingness to embrace
numerous, possible explanations when throughout his career there must have
been institutional forces constantly nudging him in one direction or
another? "Well, if I were coming up for tenure now, when deconstruction
reigns supreme within the entire academic universe, I probably wouldn' t
get it," he answers simply. "There used to be more freedom of thought and
expression, less worry about what peers said. Today there's sort of an
academic mafia that runs things. You line up outside these hotel rooms
during conferences, wait for a job interview. If you say the wrong thing,
you're bad and you don't get in."
Coe is equally undoctrinaire in his attitude toward those untouchables-
-the traffickers in antiquities, the dealers, collectors, and fringe
operators--who violate rules yet possess considerable empirical knowledge.
"There's so much puritanical hypocrisy in American culture. They never
would have read the Rosetta Stone if they'd worried about its being looted.
That mentality is only more dominant now and it's counterproductive. I know
the guy who said he'd rather see looted objects ground up in powder than be
studied by someone. There are reputable publications that won't accept
papers written based on anything but stuff dug up by archaeologists. What
would we know about Greek vase painting if we played by those rules?"
For those archaeologists who refuse to consider surviving practices among
related peoples living today, Coe is equally critical. "It's this
conceptual side they ignore entirely, and they resent anyone who deals with
it. They are more content with their own conception of what the past was
like and what these people were like than what those people might have been
like and what they might have thought. It's the difference between what we
call emic, or what a culture thinks and says, versus etic, which is what
the scholar sitting in his or her office thinks they did. These days,
thanks to this academic fad called deconstruction--in literature, art
history, in all fields- -it no longer makes any difference what Hemingway
thinks he was writing. It's irrelevant. It's only what the academic thinks
Hemingway said that seems to be important. I don't believe that!"
The fiercely independent Coe, whom Eric Thompson (in reference to Dickens'
Pickwick Papers) used to call Joe the Fat Boy, is off to the barbershop in
his four-wheel drive vehicle with a Connecticut license plate that reads
"Olmec." The retired professor from Yale is hardly fat and certainly not a
boy, and yet his stamina, humor, most of all his unwavering hunger to keep
learning--all are traits of the beginner in the best sense of the word.
Instinctively, Coe feels comfortable casting the net ever wider, studying
related disciplines, collaborating with those seemingly far afield, all in
hopes of turning up more pieces to the great puzzle. Refreshingly
irreverent at every turn, he wears with pride his badge as one of the
splendid troublemakers of Mesoamerican archaeology.